Browse Books

GOP 1, TVCA 0

Tools

Let's not kid ourselves, as most of the direct participants have,
about the outcome of the showdown over the 2008 Tennessee Voter
Confidence Act. When Nashville chancellor Russell Perkins declined last
week to issue the injunction sought by plaintiffs trying to force the
hand of stonewalling state election authorities, he in effect
foreclosed on a guarantee that the act can be enforced in 2010.

Without such an injunction, it seems clear that Secretary of State
Tre Hargett and state Election Coordinator Mark Goins will attempt to
run the clock out until January when the legislature convenes again.
And the Republican majorities in both houses, fully alert now to how
the game is being played, will pick up where they left off in the 2009
legislative session. That was when, on the eve of the General
Assembly's adjournment, they tried to vote a postponement of the act's
provisions until after the 2010 election cycle but narrowly failed to
do so, essentially because a handful of key GOP members happened to be
elsewhere on the day of the vote.

That oversight will be corrected in January, when party discipline
will rule the day. The reality is that Democrats want the TVCA in
effect for the 2010 election cycle and the Republicans don't. The GOP
will have the votes, and all that remains to be seen is whether the act
is merely postponed or amended or quashed altogether.

Back in 2008, when with virtual bipartisan unanimity it passed the
legislature, the Tennessee Voter Confidence Act provided that each of
the state's 95 counties be outfitted by 2010 with optical-scan machines
capable of reading paper ballots so as to provide an accurate
electronic count while also creating a "paper trail" for recounts in
case of challenges to the results.

Several things happened after the passage of the act to undermine
the happy uniformity in support of it. First, the Democrats lost
control of the legislature in the 2008 elections, with the result that
Republicans, for the first time ever, would now control all 95 county
election commissions, as well as all state election-oversight
positions. Next, both parties began to gravitate toward public
attitudes about elections that are polar opposites. Democrats believe
that they prosper with the widest possible extension of the franchise.
The more restrictive Republicans are ever on guard against what they
see as organized, even random, voter roundups by their ideological
adversaries.

Although in theory the TVCA should be neutral in its implications,
it has come to be identified with the Democrats' more expansive view of
the franchise and has suffered the consequences. Republicans —
and, yes, that includes Hargett and Goins — have organized
against it. They may posture and fume about their belief, specifically
discredited by Perkins, that 2002-vintage optical-scan machines are
insufficient to fulfill the requirements of the TVCA. But it seems
obvious that an overriding motive is to forestall vote challenges
during an election year in which state Republicans can hold on to
enough legislative seats to control redistricting for the decade which
follows.

That's what this battle has been about, in a nutshell. And, for all
the rosy hopes still being expressed by advocates of TVCA, that battle
now seems close to being over.